Video — Biometric Series

An important and emerging area of facial recognition tech is “Passive Inspection Point” tech. This means the technology automatically captures consumers’ face prints as they move through public spaces like malls and on city streets. This video showcases current technology by Accenture that can automatically collect and enroll consumers’ facial biometrics from many angles.

This video is of an automatic border control entry point demo, along with examples of real-world installations of automated facial recognition-based entry systems. This technology collects facial recognition information from the people passing through a checkpoint to allow or disallow entry. This “ABC” type of technology is used at entrances to places such as commercial companies, border crossings, and airports.

This video is about the Seek Avenger, a sophisticated mobile biometric collection and enrollment unit. This unit can collect iris scans, fingerprints, face and demographic information, which it can wirelessly send back to a biometric database for identity comparison.

This is the World Privacy Forum video series on biometrics. We filmed these videos on site at Biometrics 2013 in London, the premier global biometrics event. We spoke on a panel about privacy and biometrics, and we explored the newest advances in biometric technologies. These videos offer a brief glimpse into some of the most important biometric devices and tech being used and developed today. This page will be updated frequently as we add new videos.

To score is human. Ranking individuals by grades and other performance numbers is as old as human society. Consumer scores — numbers given to individuals to describe or predict their characteristics, habits, or predilections — are a modern day numeric shorthand that ranks, separates, sifts, and otherwise categorizes individuals and also predicts their potential future actions. This new report by Pam Dixon and Robert Gellman explores this issue of predictive scores and privacy.

This Jan. 30, 2014 report discusses a new right to restrict disclosure of health information under the updated HIPAA health privacy rule. The new provision called “Pay Out of Pocket,” also called the “Right to Restrict Disclosure” gives patients the right to request that their health care provider not report or disclose their information to their health plans when they pay for medical services in full. Navigating the new right will take effort and planning for patients to utilize effectively. This substance of this report is about the new patient right to restrict disclosure, and how patients can use it to protect health privacy.

This report focuses on government use of commercial data brokers, the implications for that usage, and what needs to be done to address privacy problems. The government must bring itself fully to heel in the area of privacy. If it is going to outsource its data needs to commercial data brokers, it needs to attach the privacy standards it would have been held to if it had collected the data itself. Outsourcing is not an excuse for evading privacy obligations. Report authors: Bob Gellman and Pam Dixon.